Early Heresies
To claim a wonderful unity as distinctive of the followers of Jesus Christ in the Apostolic days is not to forget that there were exceptions to the general rule. There were indeed no rival communions then which, while claiming to be Christian, were maintained in formal opposition to the Church of the Apostles. It is expressly stated by Tertullian (Adv. Marcion., IV, v) that the Marcionites, in the middle of the second century, were the first who, when expelled from the Church Catholic, created an opposition Church for the expression of their peculiar views. Before that time the dissentients contented themselves with forming parties and schools of thought, and of this, mode of separation, which sufficed to put men outside the Church, there are clear traces in the New-Testament writings together with predictions that the evil thus originating would become more pronounced in after times.
Men of what would nowadays be called independent temperament were dissatisfied with the Apostles' teaching in some particulars, and refused to accept it without further warrant than the mere "word of an Apostle". Thus in the Epistle to the Galatians, in spite of the decision of the Council of Jerusalem, there continued to be a party which insisted that the observance of the Jewish Law was obligatory on Gentile Christians, and from the Epistle to the Colossians that there was likewise a Jewish party, probably of Hellenistic origin, which mingled insistence on Jewish legalities with a superstitious worship of the angels (Col., ii, 18). At Ephesus the adepts of an incipient Gnosticism are in St. Paul's warnings against giving heed to "fables and endless genealogies' (I Tim., i, 4) and against "profane and vain babblings and oppositions of 'gnosis' falsely so-called" (I Tim., vi, 20). Hymenous and Alexander are mentioned by name as denying the resurrection of the flesh at the last day (II Tim., ii, 18. Cf. I Cor., xv, 12). St. John, in the Apocalypse (ii, 6, 15), tells us of the Nicolaites who eeem to have fallen into some kind of Oriental admixture of immorality with worship, and in his second Epistle (verse 7. Cf. I John, iv, 2) he warns his readers that many "deceivers are entered into the world" who confess not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, which the church historians refer to the Docetism of Cerinthus.
In the writings of the early Fathers, which contain their testimony to the nature of the Church as it existed in their days, the Church was widely spread through the known regions of the world, but it was still, as in the days of St. Paul, everywhere one and the same, all its members in whatever place being united in the profession of the same faith, in the participation of the same sacraments, and in obedience to pastors who themselves form one corporate body ana are united by the bond of an intimate solidarity.
The Christian Church from the earliest days of its existence had to meet and combat strange, and somewhat unaccountable, heresies. These for the most part disappeared before the first three centuries had run their course, leaving few traces behind them. The Manichoean heresy, a late development of Gnosticism, in some of its developments alone seems to have lived on into the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church emerged as the dominant institution around the beginning of the fourth century; however, other groups following the "tradition of descent" or the "evangelical alternative" continued to spread the teachings of Jesus.
A modern reader of St. Irenous's "Adversus heresos" might be inclined to object that the heretics of those days held doctrines so preposterous that his severe language about them is intelligible without our having to suppose that he would have judged with similar severity doctrines opposed to the tradition which could claim tc rest upon a more rational basis. But his principle of the authority of the tradition is manifestly intended to have universal application, and may be safely taken as supplying the test by which this typical Father of the second century would, were he living now, judge of the modern systems in conflict with the Church's tradition.
The entirety of The Refutation of all Heresies, with the exception of Book i., was found in a manuscript brought from a convent on Mount Athos so recently as the year 1842. For a biography of Hippolytus we have not much authentic materials. Hippolytus must have been born in the second half of the 2nd century, probably in Rome. There can be no reasonable doubt but that he was a bishop, and passed the greater portion of his life in Rome and its vicinity. As a presbyter of the church at Rome under Bishop Zephyrinus (199-217), Hippolytus was distinguished for his learning and eloquence. It was at this time that Origen, then a young man, heard him preach. It was probably not long before questions of theology and church discipline brought him into direct conflict with Zephyrinus, or at any rate with his successor Calixtus I. (q.v.). He accused the bishop of favouring the Christological heresies of the Monarchians, and, further, of subverting the discipline of the Church by his lax action in receiving back into the Church those guilty of gross offences. The result was a schism, and for perhaps over ten years Hippolytus stood as bishop at the head of a separate church. Then came the persecution under Maximinus the Thracian. Hippolytus and Pontius, who was then bishop, were transported in 235 to Sardinia, where it would seem that both of them died.
the Refutation of all Heresies, which had come to be known by the inappropriate title of the Philosophumena, was the most important of his polemical treatises. Of its ten books, the second and third are lost; Book i. was for a long time printed (with the title Philosophumena) among the works of Origen; Books iv.-x. were found in 1842 by the Greek Minoides Mynas, without the name of the author, in a MS. at Mount Athos. It is nowadays universally admitted that Hippolytus was the author, and that Books i. and iv.-x belong to the same work.
In the year 313 the Emperor Constantine the Great in the West and Licinius Augustus in the East issued the Edict of Milan, the great charter of toleration which confirmed to each individual of the Roman world the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. But this inestimable privilege was soon violated: with the knowledge of truth, the emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the Catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity. Constantine easily believed that the Heretics, who presumed to dispute his opinions, or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy.
Constantine absolutely prohibited the assemblies of the Heretics, and confiscated their public property to the use either of the revenue or of the Catholic church. The sects against whom the Imperial severity was directed appear to have been the adherents of Paul of Samosata; the Montanists of Phrygia, who maintained an enthusiastic succession of prophecy; the Novatians, who sternly rejected the temporal efficacy of repentance; the Marcionites and Valentinians, under whose leading banners the various Gnostics of Asia and Egypt had insensibly rallied; and perhaps the Manicheans, who had recently imported from Persia an artful composition of Oriental and Christian theology.
Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia in 367 (died 403), one of the Church fathers, was born in Palestine, near Eleutheropolis, in the early part of the 4th century (between 310 and 320). He is the patriarch of heresy-hunters. He identified Christianity with monastic piety and ecclesiastical orthodoxy, and considered it the great mission of his life to pursue the hydra of heresy into all its hiding-places. He was lacking in knowledge of the world and of men, in sound judgment, and in critical discernment. He was possessed of a boundless credulity, now almost proverbial, causing innumerable errors and contradictions in his writings. His style is entirely destitute of beauty or elegance; still, his works are of considerable value as a storehouse of the history of ancient heresies and of patristic polemics. Panarium (medicine-chest), a treatise against heresies, was written at the request of two monks, named Paul and Acacius, belonging to a monastery near Berea, in Lower Syria. The whole includes an account of eighty heresies, twenty of which were before Christ. With the sixty-fourth heresy he begins his account of the heresies of his own age.
After the brief triumph which attended the conversion of Constantine, trouble and trial had returned as the imperial protectors were failing in power or in faith. Strange forms of evil were rising in the distance, and were thronging for the conflict. There was but one spot in the whole of Christendom, one voice in the whole Episcopate, to which the faithful turned in hope in that miserable day. In the year 493, in the Pontificate of Gelasius, the whole of the East was in the hands of traitors to Chalcedon, and the whole of the West under the tyranny of the open enemies of Nicaea. Italy was the prey of robbers; mercenary bands had overrun its territory, and barbarians were seizing on its farms and settling in its villas. The peasants were thinned by famine and pestilence.
Tuscany might be even said, as Gelasius words it, to contain scarcely a single inhabitant. Odoacer was sinking before Theodoric, and the Pope was changing one Arian master for another. And as if one heresy were not enough, Pelagianism was spreading with the connivance of the Bishops in the territory of Picenum. In the north of the dismembered empire, the Britons had first been infected by Pelagianism, and now were dispossessed by the heathen Saxons. The Armoricans still preserved a witness of Catholicism in the west of Gaul; but Picardy, Champagne, and the neighbouring provinces, where some remnant of its supremacy had been found, had lately submitted to the yet heathen Clovis. The Arian kingdoms of Burgundy in France, and of the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain, oppressed a zealous and Catholic clergy. Africa was in a still more deplorable condition under the cruel sway of the Vandal Gundamond.
In the East, Acacius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, had secretly taken part against the Council of Chalcedon and was under Papal excommunication. Nearly all the whole East had sided with Acacius, and a schism had begun between East and West, which lasted for thirty-five years. The Henoticon was in force, and at the Imperial command had been signed by all the Patriarchs and Bishops throughout the Eastern empire. In Armenia the Churches were ripening for the pure Eutychianism which they adopted in the following century; and in Egypt the Acephali had already broken off from the Monophysite Patriarch, were extending in the east and west of the country, and preferred the loss of the Episcopal Succession to the reception of the Council of Chalcedon.
While Monophysites or their favorers occupied the Churches of the Eastern empire, Nestorianism was making progress in the territories beyond it. Barsumas had filled the See of Nisibis, Theodore was read in the schools of Persia, and the successive Catholici [the title of the Nestorian Patriarchs] of Seleucia had abolished Monachism and were secularising the clergy.
Monasticism, or Monachism, is a state of life in retirement from the world adopted for motives of religion. It is not peculiar to Christianity, for in many religions, as that of Israel, and in those of India, China and Tibet, the same motive has led men to withdraw themselves wholly or in part from converse with worldly society and to seek in seclusion and retirement opportunity to lead a purer or higher life. The Nazarites, the Rechabites, the Essenes, the Therapeutae were separatists from society in a greater or less degree, and in this respect were the precursors of the ascetae of the earliest Christian age and of the hermits or anachoretse and the cccnobites of the 3d and 4th centuries. Though these ancient heresies no longer exist, the principles they embodied are the very same which, taking other forms, have invariably motived the long series of revolts against the authority of the Catholic Church.
First there are certain intellectual difficulties which have always puzzled the human mind. The difficulty of explaining the derivation of the finite from the infinite, and the difficulty of explaining the coexistence of evil with good in the physical and moral universe, motived the strange speculations of the Gnostics and the simpler but not less inconsistent theory of the Manichaeans. The difficulty of harmonizing the mystery of the Trinity in Unity, and that of the Incarnation, with the conceptions of natural reason motived the heresies of the Patripassians, the Sabellians, the Macedonians, and the Arians, and again the difficulty of conceiving the supernatural or justifying the idea of inherited sin motived the Pelagian denial of these doctrines.
A second source of heresies has been the outburst of strong religious emotions, usually based on fancied visions to which, as being direct communications from on high, it was claimed that the traditional teaching of the Church must give way. Montanism, that earliest example of what are now glorified as "religions of the Spirit", was the most striking example of this class.
Thirdly, the chafing under the rule of authority, with the desire to pursue personal ambitions, is discernible in the origins of Novatianism and Donatism, whose founders, although they alleged on the flimsiest grounds that the rulers they wished to displace had been irregularly appointed, must be held to have acted primarily from the desire to exalt themselves, even at the risk of dividing the Christian community.
In the fourth place comes the principle of nationalism, that is of nationalistic exclusivism, in those who ally themselves with a separatist movement not from any conviction personally formed of the justice of the arguments on its behalf, but because its leaders have contrived to present it to them as a means of emphasizing their national feeling. This has always proved a potent instrument in the hands of heretical leaders, and we have early examples of it in the way in which Donatism presented itself as the religion of the Africans, and Arianism as the religion of the Goths.
A last class of motives which has often worked for separation is to be sought in the disposition of temporal rulers to intrude into the administration of the ecclesiastical province and mould ecclesiastical arrangements into forms that may assist their own political schemes. We have an example of this evil in the conduct of the Emperors Constantius and Valens, who so disastrously fostered the Arian heresy.
To all these false principles the orthodox Fathers opposed, in the first place, the authority of the tradition that had come down from the Apostles, though not refusing to meet the heresiarchs on their own ground also, and refute them by argument, as many beautiful treatises testify.
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